All the King's Men (25 page)

The blood began to climb up in Hugh Miller’s face, and he shook his head just a little, just barely, the way a slow animal does when a fly skims by. Then he said, “There’s nothing in the constitution says that Byram B. White can commit a felony with impunity.”

“Hugh,” the Boss began, soft, “don’t you see that Byram doesn’t mean a thing? Not in this situation. What they’re after is to break the administration. They don’t care about Byram, except so far as it’s human nature to hate to think somebody else is getting something when you aren’t. What they care about is undoing what this administration has done. And now is the time to stomp ‘em. And when you start out to do something–” he sat up straight in the chair now, with his hands on the overstuffed sides, and thrust his head forward at Hugh Miller–”you got to use what you’ve got. You got to use fellows like Byram, and Tiny Duffy, and that scum down in the Legislature. You can’t make bricks without straw, and most of the time all the straw you got is secondhand straw from the cowpen. And if you think you can make it any different, you’re crazy as a hoot owl.”

Hugh Miller straightened his shoulders a little. He did not look at the Boss but at the wall beyond the Boss. “I am offering my resignation as Attorney General,” he said. “You will have it in writing, by messenger, in the morning.”

“You took a long time to do it,” the Boss said softly. “A long time, Hugh. What made you take such a long time?”

Hugh Miller didn’t answer, but he did move his gaze from the wall to the Boss’s face.

“I’ll tell you, Hugh,” the Boss said. “You sat in you law office fifteen years and watched the sons-of-bitches warm chairs in this state and not do a thing, and the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Then I came along and slipped a Louisville Slugger in your hand and whispered low, ‘You want to step in there and lay round you a little? And you did. You had a wonderful time. You made the fur fly and you put nine tin-horn grafters in the pen. But you never touched what was behind ‘em. The law isn’t made for that. All you can do about that is take the damned government away from the behind guys and keep it away from ‘em. Whatever way you can. You know that down in your heart. You want to keep your Harvard hands clean, but way down in your heart you know I’m telling the truth, and you’re asking the benefit of somebody getting his little patties potty-black. You know you’re welching if you pull out. That,” he said, softer than ever, and leaned toward Hugh Miller, peering up at him. “is why it took you so long to do it. To pull out.”

Hugh Miller looked down at him a half minute, down into the beefy upturned face and the steady protruding eyes. There was a shadowed, puzzled expression on Hugh Miller’s face, as though he were trying to read something in a bad light, or in a foreign language he didn’t know very well. Then he said, “My mind is made up.”

“I know your mind’s made up,” the Boss said. “I know I couldn’t change your mind, Hugh.” He stood up in front of his chair, hitched his trousers up, the way a fellow has to who is putting it on some around the middle, and sock-footed over to Hugh Miller. “Too bad,” he said. “You and me make quite a team. Your brains and my brawn.”

Hugh Miller gave something which resembled an incipient smile.

“No hard feelings?” the Boss said, and stuck out his hand.

Hugh Miller took it.

“If you don’t give up likker, you might drop in and have a drink with me some time,” the Boss said. “I won’t talk politics.”

“All right,” Hugh Miller said, and turned toward the door.

He had just about made the door, when the Boss said, “Hugh.” Hugh Miller stopped and looked back.

“You’re leaving me alone,” the Boss said, in semicomic woe, “with the sons-of-bitches. Mine and the other fellow’s.”

Hugh Miller smiled in a stiff, embarrassed way, shook his head, said, “Hell–Willie–” let his voice trail off without ever saying what he had started to say, and then Harvard Law School, Lafayette Escadrille, Croix de Guerre, clean hands and pure heart, was with us no longer.

The Boss sank down on the foot of the bed, heaved his left ankle up over his right knee; and while he meditatively scratched the left foot, the way a farmer does when he takes off his shoes at night, he stared at the closed door.

“With the sons-of-bitches,” he said, and let the foot slip off the knee and plop to the floor, while he still stared to the door.

I stood up again. It was my third try for getting out of the place and getting back to my hotel for some sleep. The Boss could sit up all night, night after night, and never show it, and that fact was sure hell on his associates. I edged toward the door again, but the Boss swung his stare to me and I knew something was coming. So I just stopped and waited for it, while the stare worked over my face and tried to probe around in the gray stuff inside my head, like a pair of forceps.

Then he said, “You think I ought to thrown White to the wolves?”

“It’s a hell of a time to be asking that question,” I said.

“You think I ought?”

“_Ought__ is a funny word,” I said. “If you mean, to win, then time will tell. If you mean, to do right, then nobody will ever be able to tell you.”

“What do you think?

“Thinking is not my line,” I said, “and I’d advise you to stop thinking about it because you know damned well what you are going to do. You are going to do what you are doing.”

“Lucy is figuring on leaving,” he said calmly, as though that answered something I had said.

“Well, I’m damned,” I said, in genuine surprise, for I had Lucy figured as the long-suffering type on whose bosom repentant tears always eventually fall. Very eventually. Then my glance strayed to the closed door, beyond which Sadie Burke sat in front of the telephone with that pair of black bituminous eyes in the middle of the pocked face and cigarette smoke tangled in that wild black hacked-off Irish hair like morning mist in a pine thicket.

He caught my glance at the door. “No,” he said, “it’s not that.”

“Well, that would be enough by ordinary standards,” I said.

“She didn’t know. Not that I know of.”

“She’s a woman,” I said, “and they can smell it.”

“That wasn’t it,” he said. “She said if I took care of Byram White she would leave me.”

“Looks like everybody is trying to run your business for you.”

“God damn it!” he said, and came up off the bed, and paced savagely across the carpet for four paces, and swung, and paced again, and seeing that motion and the heavy sway of the head when he turned, I thought back to the night when I had heard the pacing in the next room in those jerkwater hotels over the state back in the days when the Boss had been Willie Stark, and Willie Stark had been the sucker with the high-school-debater speech full of facts and figures and the kick-me sign on his coattails.

Well, I was seeing it now–the lunging, taut motion that had then been on the other side of the wall, in the dry-goods-box little hotel room. Well, it was out of that room now. It was prowling the veldt.

“God damn it!” he said again, “they don’t know a thing about it, they don’t know how it is, and you can’t tell ‘em.”

He paced back and forth a couple of times more, then said, “They don’t know.”

He swung again, paced, and stopped, his head thrust out toward me. “You know what I’m going to do? Soon as I bust the tar out of that gang.”

“No,” I said, “I don’t know.”

“I’m going to build me the God-damnedest, biggest, chromium-platedest, formaldehyde-stinkingest free hospital and health center the All-Father ever let live. Boy, I tell you, I’m going to have a cage of canaries in every room that can sing Italian grand opera and there ain’t going to be a nurse hasn’t won a beauty contest at Atlantic City and every bedpan will be eighteen carat gold and by Gold, every bedpan will have a Swiss music-box attachment to play ‘Turkey in the Straw’ or ‘The Sextet from Lucia,’ take your choice.”

“That will be swell,” I said.

“I’ll do it,” he said. “You don’t believe me, but I’m going to do it.”

“I believe every word of it,” I said I was dead for sleep. I stood there, rocking on my heels, and through the haze I watched him pace and swing and lunge, and sway his big head, with the hair coming down to his eyes.

I suppose then that it was a wonder that Lucy Stark hadn’t packed her suitcase a long time before. I didn’t see how she didn’t know about something which could scarcely be called a secret. When it began I never knew. But it was already full blown when I found out about it. The Boss went up to Chicago on a little piece of private business, about six or eight months after he got to be Governor, and took me with him. Up there a fellow named Josh Conklin did us the town, and he was the man to do it, a big, burly fellow, with prematurely white hair and a red face and black, beetling eyebrows and a dress suit that fitted him like a corset and a trick apartment like a movie set and an address book an inch thick. He wasn’t the real thing, but he sure was a good imitation of it, which is frequently better that the real thing, for the real thing can relax but the imitation can’t afford to and has to spend all the time being just one cut more real than the real thing, with money no object. He took us to a night club where they rolled out a sheet of honest-to-God ice on the floor and a bevy of “Nordic Nymphs” in silver gee-strings and silver brassières came skating out on real skates to whirl and fandango and cavort and sway to the music under the housebroke aurora borealis with the skates flashing and the white knees flashing and white arms serpentining in the blue light, and the little twin, hard-soft columns of muscle and flesh up the backbones of the bare backs swaying and working in a beautiful reciprocal motion, and what was business under the silver brassières vibrating to music, and the long unbound unsnooded silver innocent Swedish hair trailing and floating and whipping in the air.

It took the boy from Mason City, who had never seen any ice except the skim-ice on the horse trough. “Jesus,” the boy from Mason City said, in unabashed admiration. And then, “Jesus.” And he kept swallowing hard, as though he had a sizable chunk of dry corn pone stuck in his throat.

It was over, and Josh Conklin said politely, “How did you like that, Governor?”

“They sure can skate,” the Governor said.

Then one of the Swedish-haired nymphs came out of the dressing room with her skates off and a silver cloak draped over her bare shoulders, and came over to the table. She was a friend of Josh Conklin’s and a very nice friend to have even if the hair had not come from Sweden but from the drugstore. Well, she had a friend in the act, so she got her friend, who quickly made friends with the Governor, who, for the rest of the stay in Chicago, practically dropped out of my life except for the period every night when the skating was going on. Then he’d be sitting there watching the gyrating, and swallowing on the chunk of dry corn pone stuck in his throat. Then when the last act was over he’s say, “Good night, Jack,” and he and the friend of the friend of Josh Conklin would head off into the night.

I don’t know that Lucy ever knew about the skating rink, but Sadie did. For Sadie had channels of information closed to the home-maker type. When the Boss and I got back home, and the Nordic Nymphs were but a fond memory, a soft sweet spot in the heart like the bruised place in a muskmelon, it was Sadie who raised the seven varieties of Hibernian hell. The very morning the Boss and I hit town, I heard rumbling from inside the Boss’s office as I stood in the outer room chatting with the girl who was the receptionist and catching up with the gossip. I noticed the racket inside, a noise like somebody slamming a book on a desk and then a voice, Sadie’s voice. “What’s going on?” I asked the girl.

“Yeah, you tell me what went on in Chicago,” the girl said.

“Oh,” exclaimed I in my innocence, “so that is it.”

“Oh,” she exclaimed, mimicking me, “that was it, and how!”

I retired to the door of my cubbyhole, which opened off the outside room. I was standing just inside, with my door wide open, when Sadie burst out of the Boss’s door about the way one of the big cats, no doubt, used to bounce out of the hutch at the far end of the arena and head fro the Christian martyr. Her hair was flying with distinct life and her face was chalk-white with the pock marks making it look like riddled plaster, like, say, a plaster-of-Paris mask of Medusa which some kid has been using as a target for a BB gun. But in the middle of the plaster-of-Paris mask was n event which had nothing whatsoever to do with plaster of Paris: her eyes, and they were a twin disaster, they were a black explosion, they were a conflagration. She was running a head of steam to bust the rivets, and the way she snatched across the floor you could hear the seams pop in her skirt.

Then she caught sight of me, and without change of pace swung straight into my room and slammed the door behind her.

“The son-of-a-bitch,” she said, and stood there panting and glaring at me.

“You needn’t blame me,” I said.

“The son-of-a-bitch,” she iterated, glaring, “I’ll kill him, I swear to God I’ll kill him.”

“You set a high valuation on something,” I said.

“I’ll ruin him, I’ll drive him out of this state, I swear to God. The son-of-a-bitch to two-time me after all I’ve done for him. Listen–” she said, and grabbed a handful of my lapels in each of her strong hands and shook me (He hands were squarish and strong and hard like a man’s.) “Listen–” she repeated.

“You needn’t choke me,” I protested peevishly, “and I don’t want to listen. O know too God-damned much now.” And I wasn’t joking. I didn’t want to listen. The world was full of things I didn’t want to know.

“Listen–” and she shook me–”who made that son-of-a-bitch what he is today? Who made him Governor? Who took him when he was the Sap of the Year and put him in big time? Who gave it to him, play by play so he couldn’t lose?”

“I reckon you mean for me to say you did.”

“And it’s the truth,” she said, “and he goes and two-times me, the–”

“No,” I said, trying to get loose from the grip on my lapels, “he was two-timing Lucy, so you need some other kind of arithmetic for what he was doing to you. But I don’t know whether to multiply or divide in a case like this.”